Revision as of 17:46, 17 September 2009

Yiddish is spoken as a daily language in some parts of America, mostly in New York City, and in some parts of Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, and South America, as well as in Israel. It is slightly higher than standard German, with a large admixture of words of Hebrew, Slavic, or other origin. As Yiddish is roughly 75% Germanic in origin, German speakers can understand a large part of it.

Yiddish is written with the same alphabet as Hebrew, with a few additional letters, and is written from right to left.

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Pronunciation guide

Yiddish pronounciation is different from German or Israeli Hebrew. Words of European origin are spelled out, similar to most European languages, and can be said as they are spelled. On the other hand, words of Semitic (Hebrew and Aramaic) origin are written just as in the original Hebrew or Aramaic, without vowels. In many cases you must learn how to pronounce these words in Yiddish; you cannot necessarily work it out from their spelling, and they are mostly pronounced differently from Israeli Hebrew.

Take note that most native speakers do not use most of the diacritical marks. For example, both "אַ" and "אָ" are usually written as "א". While "ײַ" is almost always written as "ײ". In the latter case, this makes sense, as words represented here as "ey" or "ay" are often pronounced slightly differently from dialect to dialect.

Furthermore, "פֿ" is almost always written as "פ", because there is a dot in "פּ" to distinguish it.

The dots used to distinguish "ייִ" from "ײ" are often replaced with an "א" as in "װאו" rather than "װוּ" which is somewhat clumsy visually.